"What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies."
- Aristotle, Attributed
The Golgan valley's necropolitan pedigree was lost on Seydon.
It'd appeared out of the wastes like a heat-haze apparition, with its opulent and reinforced vaulted adobe bulwarks and wind-chewed gargoyles hunched over concentric palisades and multi-metre thick defense walling surrounding a gutted city settlement. A once grand township arranged around the broken castle parapets of an esteemed fortress, festooned with score-marked crenellations and combat-shattered battlements. Vast craters of blackened, heat-contorted and semi-glassed sand dotted the interior settlement and portions of the stubborn castle. The central donjon was still erect, painfully defiant against age, erosion, and palpable structural damage that'd bitten wide chunks out of the foundation and had cracked open most of the encircling defense towers.
The Golgan Necropolis was empty and withered when Seydon wound his way through a breakage wrought through the outer walling. Inclement, periodic sandstorms had buried the interior city in the eastern reaches in dune drifts nearly reaching the height of the defense walls. The remaining commerce and urban boroughs westward had been scavenger-stripped. Most constructions had been gutted of precious materials, from copper-alloy plumbing to savaged holo-fi router networks, the foodstuff distribution centres wholly despoiled. He'd uncovered undignified scav-soldier burial plots, where dead raiders and opportunistic rummager's had been pitched into mass graves and subsequently buried under garbage and reused refuse.
There were occasional hazards. Hssiss reptilian tribes that staked claims to certain unlit basements in the hollows of the distribute hubs, lone terentatek prowlers haunting the back alleys and private, sand festooned gardens of once opulent upper-class Sith administrators. Next to HK-droid packs sauntering on inspite of degrading hardware and damaged hydraulics, and Sithspawn super-soldiers dumbed down to obey and execute simplistic orders while shouldering failing pnuematic armour. Seydon avoided most, leaving the beasts to graze in their favoured shadows. The droids were less genial, and were destroyed under Razorlight's flashing, cleaving edge, the Sithspawn bipedal hybrids sundered through combinations of adroit swordplay and concussive, shattering Force-power. Seydon still committed some of the dead to brief rites of burial, whispering little Dunaan prayers of tranquility to appease the recently dead 'spawn-things and hopefully prop them towards a more fruitful rebirth.
Everywhere, especially where he discovered partially sand-buried town-squares, there was despotic iconography. Statues, bass-reliefs, blinking holo-triptych depicting false imperial majesty. He uncovered either Kaine's media-chiselled likeness or that of his neophyte, the unreal handsomeness of Darth Prazutis on boastful display. Icons of personality-cult, directing local populations how to offer up their work and life's energies to their ultimate, darkly benevolent and ultimately ersatz demagogues. Seydon once ran Razorlight through the basalt angles of one still-erect Prazitus statue, knocking its face into a low drift of mica-sand and fieldspar sludge.
In time, he'd adopted the former Dark Lord bedchambers as a temporary safe house. Salvaged generator banks hauled up from the township were installed along walling previously hosting barbarous armoire. A meditation chamber was stripped, replaced with a crude kitchenette of bent tin, hammered iron, and rough gas-burners, the bath-chambers rerouted to take advantage of still functional reservoirs not yet penetrated by scav-raiders. Each facet was temporary, non-committal. Seydon prowled the horizon with a scavenged assault-rifle monocular, watching for the next scav-shuttle would make landfall to try their luck harrowing the Golg Necropolis.
Today, an hour before high noon-hour, he was tracking the far south horizon-line of toothy picks when a touch of motion in the south-central township-square caught his eye. Seydon cantered and recentered his monocular. Followed a singular outline, a man hunched under the weight of a water pole weighted with sloshing canisters. Then a blasted red-sand tempest began blowing a gale through the Golgan valley. The monocular's resolution was scratched, flawed with digital artefacts, but there was something in the man's bearding and personal bearing that was... awfully, hauntingly familiar. A Levantine? Out here? Impossible, Seydon thought, they were a defunct breed long relegated to a well-earned retirement, pasturing in the mid-rim where he'd spent considerable fortunes dug out out the Sanctum's private reserves to establish comfortable retirements.
But he
knew that face, beside the bristling facial hair and threadbare woolen cap. Seydon jerked a salvaged, high-yield flash-strobe. His thumb clicked briskly on the power-on nipple. If the singular figure down below hustling out of the sandstorm gale saw it, they'd note a tri-bright flash of Morse-code lighting from a high battlement window, blinking an old Levantine message within a series of obtuse
dits and
dahs. [Speak – Friend – And – Enter]
Seydon pulled away from the crashed window, out of the howl of sand and gale, blasting grit out of his nose. ...Praying. To any and all friendly gods and ghosts that still favoured the Path. He swigged briefly from a repurposed purse transformed into a leather wineskin. The last of his three-day water supply. He'd have to venture into the dungeon sub-basements to activate the pumps again. Seydon couldn't repress a shudder; a watcher lurked in the long cavities burrowed into the mantle, with an avidly demonstrated appetite for flesh. He laid Winterfang over his lap and risked a peak over the window sill, wondering if his instinct had been correct. He swore, he
knew that face! But from where?